​I am an art historian dedicated to investigating how marginalized bodies have been made to appear throughout the history of art, especially those of queer, trans, and intersex people; disabled people; and people with limited economic means. Titled Deep Cuts: Transgender History in American Art since WWII, my dissertation explores how historically transsexual medicine and now transgender healthcare have appeared in modern and contemporary art in the United States. This project has been supported by: a 2020-2021 Smithsonian American Art Museum Graduate Fellowship; a 2019-2020 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art; a library fellowship from the Getty Research Institute; the Don Kelly Research Fellowship at the Cushing Library at Texas A&M University; Stanford's Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Fellowship; and a graduate fellowship with Stanford's Center for Ethics and Society.

I entered into the field of art history through studio art, studying painting as an undergraduate at Bennington College (BA, 2008) and as a graduate student in the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA - MFA, 2010). As a lecturer at George Mason University, Towson University, and other colleges in the Baltimore/DC area from 2011 to 2013, I found that I became especially alive not just by teaching how to make art, but by discussing with students why art is so culturally potent and historically important. To strengthen my ability to facilitate these conversations, I returned to graduate school in 2013 to pursue art history, first as an MA student at the University of California, Riverside, then as a PhD student at Stanford University in 2015. I advanced to candidacy at Stanford in 2017, and plan to finish my doctoral degree in 2021.

Personal experience has driven me to focus my teaching and research on identifying, describing, and investigating how and to what end marginalized people are made to appear in works of art and visual materials. Being a transgender person in the United States has given me the opportunity to see how current and historic power structures have shaped the experiences of women and gender variant people in the US and beyond. As a sibling of a disabled person, I have also gained personal knowledge of the effects of ableism. Additionally, I have worked to support myself through school and borrowed a dizzying amount of money to pursue my education. As a result, I am deeply committed to addressing works of art and visual materials that activate a range of class experiences, empathetic to the financial difficulties many students face in pursuing education, and invested in making institutions of higher education accessible to people in challenging socioeconomic positions.

In tandem with my scholarly pursuits, I also serve on the organizing committee for the Sibling Transformation Project, a national organization committed to supporting adult siblings of disabled people in becoming strong advocates for themselves and their families, and their communities. To find out more about the Sibling Transformation Project, please see the project website.